Tag Archives: social media analytics

I spent most of the last week on holiday in Italy. But since the holiday was built around a speaking gig in Italy at the Be Wizard Digital Marketing conference I still spent a couple of days talking analytics and digital. A couple of days I thoroughly enjoyed. The conference closed with a Q&A for a small group of speakers and while I got a few real analytics questions it felt more like a meet and greet – with plenty of puff-ball questions like “what word would use to describe the conference?” A question I failed miserably with the very pathetic answer “fun”.

I guess that’s why it’s better to ask me analytics questions.

The word I probably should have chosen is “gelato”.

And not just because I hogged down my usual totally ridiculous amount of fragola, melone, cioccolato, and pesca – scoop by scoop from Rimini to Venice.

Gelato because I had a series of rich conversations with Mat Sweezey from Salesforce (nee Pardot) who gave a terrific presentation on authenticity and what it means in this new digital marketing world. It’s easy to forget how dramatically digital has changed marketing and miss some of the really important lessons from those changes. Mat also showed me a presentation on agile that blends beautifully with the digital transformation story I’ve been trying to tell in the last six months. It’s a terrific deck with some slides that explain why test&learn and agile methods work so much better than traditional methods. It’s a presentation with the signal virtue of taking very difficult concepts and making them not just clear but compelling. That’s hard to do well.

Gelato because I also talked with and enjoyed a great presentation from Chris Anderson of Cornell. Chris led a two-hour workshop in the revenue management track (which happens to be a kind of side interest of mine). His presentation focused on the impact of social media content on sites like TripAdvisor on room pricing strategies. He’s done several compelling research projects with OTAs (Online Travel Agents) looking at the influence of social media content on buying decisions. His research has looked at key variables that drive influence (number of reviews and rating), how sensitive demand is to those factors, and how that sensitivity plays out by hotel class (turns out that the riskier the lodging decision the more impactful social reviews are). He’s also looked at review response strategies on TripAdvisor and has some compelling research showing how review response can significantly improve ratings outcomes but how it’s also possible to over-respond. Respond to everything, and you actually do worse than if you respond to nothing.

That’s a fascinating finding and very much in keeping with Mat’s arguments around authenticity. If you make responding to every social media post a corporate policy, what you say is necessarily going to sound forced and artificial.

That’s why it doesn’t work.

If you’re in the hospitality industry, you should see this presentation. In fact, there are lessons here for any company interested in the impact of reviews and social content and interested in taking a more strategic view of social outreach and branding. I think Chris’ data suggest significant and largely unexplored opportunities for both better revenue management decisions around OTA pricing and better strategies around the review ask.

Gelato because there was one question I didn’t get to answer that I wanted to (and somehow no matter how much gelato I consume I always want a little more).

Since I had to have translations of the panel questions at the end, I didn’t always get a chance to respond. Sometimes the discussion had moved on by the time I understood the question! And one of the questions – how can companies compete with publishers when it comes to content creation – seemed to me deeply related to both Mat and Chris’ presentations.

Here’s the question as I remember it:

If you’re a manufacturer or a hotel chain or a retailer, all you ever hear in digital marketing is how content is king. But you’re not a content company. So how do you compete?

The old-fashioned way is to hire an agency to write some content for you. That’s not going to work. You won’t have enough content, you’ll have to pay a lot for it, and it won’t be any good. To Mat’s point around authenticity, you’re not going to fool people. You’re not going to convince them that your content isn’t corporate, mass-produced, ad agency hack-work. Because it is and because people aren’t stupid. Building a personalization strategy to make bad content more relevant isn’t going to help much either. That’s why you don’t make it a corporate policy to reply to every review and why you don’t write replies from a central team of ad writers.

Stop trying to play by the old rules.

Make sure your customer relations, desk folks, and managers understand how to build relationships with social media and give them the tools to do it. If you want authentic content, find your evangelists. People who actually make, design, support or use your products. Give them a forum. A real one. And turn them loose. Find ways to encourage them. Find ways to magnify their voice. But turn them loose.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be authentic while you try to wrap every message in a Madison Avenue gift wrapping bought from the clever folks at your ad agency. Check out Mat’s presentation (he’s a Slideshare phenom). Think about the implications of unlimited content and the ways we filter. Process the implications. The world has changed and the worst strategy in the world is to keep doing things the old way.

So gelato because the Be Wizard conference, like Italy in general, was rich, sweet, cool and left me wanting to hear (and say) a bit more!

And speaking of conferences, we’re not that far away from my second European holiday with analytics baked in – The Digital Analytics Hub in London (early June). I’ve been to DA Hub several years running now – ever since two old friends of mine started it. It’s an all conversational conference modeled on X Change and it’s always one of the highlights of my year. In addition to facilitating a couple conversations, I’m also going to be leading a very deep-dive workshop into digital forecasting. I plan to walk through forecasting from the simplest sort of forecast (everything will stay the same) to increasingly advanced techniques that rely, first on averages and smoothing, and then to models. If you’re thinking about forecasting, I really think this workshop will be worth the whole conference (and the Hub is always great anyway)…

If you’ve got a chance to be in London in early June, don’t miss the Hub.

We’re still tweaking the machine learning system and the best actor and actress categories. But our text/linguistic culture-matching model produced the following rank ordering for the best picture category:

So if you don’t know, now you know…The Big Short wins it.

Incidentally, we also scored movies that had best actor/actress nominees (since they were in our corpus). Big Short still won, but some of those movies (such as Trumbo) scored very well. You can read that anyway you like – it might indicate that the best actor and actress nominations are heavily influenced by how much voters liked the type of movie (which is certainly plausible) or it might indicate that our model is a pretty bad predictor since those movies didn’t even garner nominations. And, of course, given our sample size, it probably means nothing at all.

I think the list makes intuitive sense – which is always something of a relief when you’ve gone the long way around with a methodology. I particularly think the bottom of the list makes sense with The Martian and Mad Max. Both movies feel well outside any current Hollywood zeitgeist (except maybe the largely silent super-model refugees in MMFR). If a system can pick the losers, perhaps it can pick the winners as well. But more important to me, it suggests that our method is doing a credible job of culture matching.

With a few more weeks, we’ll probably take a closer look at some of the classifications and see if there are any biasing words/themes that are distorting the results. This stuff is hard and all too easy to get wrong – especially in your spare time. We’ll also have results from the black-box machine learning system, though we’re not confident about it, as well as what I hope will be interesting results for the actor/actress category. We’ve never believed that the method is as applicable to that problem (predicting acting awards) but we’re fairly satisfied with the initial themes that emerged from each actor/actress so we’re a little more optimistic that we’ll have an interesting solution.

People have struggled with this (big) data provider model but Factual feels like it’s found a real (and valuable) niche. Would love to see more of this grow since external data is a huge miss in most big data systems.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.